Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on gendered tropes of polar history in collections and exhibitions of two museums. Souvenirs and sewing were exchanged as gifts between explorers and "waiting women" in the high era of Arctic fever. White magic returns to haunt and partake in white mourning of failed modernity.

Paper long abstract:

The return of Vega - the first ship through the North East Passage and back - to Stockholm in 1880 was a moment of national pride. Among the ritual devices to celebrate the home coming was a black silk dress, sewn to be worn by the captain´s wife Anna. As her husband was granted rank as nobility, she was included in the rite of passage.

The theme of a waiting woman and a long-gone husband is a narrative trope, celebrating ideals of gender, faith, love and sexuality; know from classic tales. In narratives of 19th century polar expeditions, the women who waits for a brother, lover or husband plays an active, but under-research role. Anna Charlier remarried when her fiancé Nils Strindberg was lost in a failed attempt to reach the North pole in balloon. She is said never to have stopped mourning. Her embroidery was found on the remnants of clothes, worn by Nils. And her heart was reburied with him, according to her last will.

The study explores how Polar narrative tropes of waiting women have been materialized and turned into collective memory in two Swedish museum: Nordiska Museet in Stockholm and Grenna museum. Another question is how such themes may reside and emerge today. Do the gendered practices of polar magic forge with contemporary white melancholy as ghosts of modernity and its constructions of home, nation, destabilizing the dichotomy of nature and culture? Or do they also convey other disturbing, or maybe liberating messages?